After reading Ian Maclaren’s “Beside the Bonnie Briar Bush,” I feel like following the precedent of the illustrious Horace Greeley and giving some advice to ambitious wayfarers. The Drumtochty folk are so uniformly generous, self sacrificing, unselfish, humane and philanthropic, that I should advise all young men of unsettled prospects not to turn their gaze westward, but to cross the seas and settle in Drumtochty. Intellectual enterprises of the most ambitious and revolutionary character, I observe, are practically encouraged and prosper there as in no other place on earth that I ever heard of. Are you a young and poor boy consumed with a desire to fit yourself for a scholar’s life and easy fortunes? Then start for Drumtochty without further ado. The blameless farmer folk there have only to be approached by the Dominie and they will immediately start you in life and pay all your expenses to a professorial chair. Are you literary? There never was such another community with the same keen scent for true imagination and poetry. Oh, it is an ideal hamlet, truly, for the intellectuals! There are more philanthropists huddled together there in one small parish than in the rest of Great Britain and the whole United States. I think even the FLY LEAF would bring in great returns in such a community. An old lady in a hill-top town in New Hampshire has written to her local newspaper warning the youth against my corrupting influence and machinations--and so I am evidently in imminent nearness to the popularity that attends all corrupters of morals. This good lady does not charge me with any actual breaches of morality, but she detects an irreverence in my temperament and mind that might lead me to the commission of all the crimes that moral folk find so much joy in contemplating. There is, she avers, a flippancy in my view of some established things that might lead to any perversion of youth. She is sure I am immoral and should be suppressed, although she can discover no more heinous offence in me than a certain callousness in regard to the feelings of witless respectables and old fogies. She objects to the use of that term of opprobrium, and considers it _indecent_. If it could only be proved so--why, hooray! If this rumor of our immorality can only be carried far and wide enough, it is clear our fortunes are made. This is the secret of success in contemporary literature. All the novelists of the day are worrying out this problem: How to present some new phase of morality that shall contain the broadest suggestions of immorality. THE LONDON ACADEMY The Leading Critical Literary Journal of London, in a long review of “MEDITATIONS IN MOTLEY,” by WALTER BLACKBURN HARTE, says, among other things: